SUPREME COURT Man Acquitted On Charge Of Rape

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31306, 28 February 1967, Page 10

SUPREME COURT Man Acquitted On Charge Of Rape

A man who stood trial in the Supreme Court yesterday, accused of raping a young Rangiora woman at Pines Beach on November 3, gave evidence in his own defence that she had been a perfectly willing party to intercourse, and had “just walked Off” after the incident occurred. This, said the accused, was because his car had become stuck on a sandy track. The woman had not wanted to wait while he extricated it, but to get home to her children. The accused, Neville Gowland, aged 27, a ropemaker (Mr R. G. Blunt) was found not guilty, and discharged by Mr Justice Macarthur, after the jury (including five women) had deliberated for an hour. The Crown’s case against Gowland, as given in evidence by the complainant, was that after getting her to accompany him on a drive to Christchurch on the afternoon of November 3, he had returned to Kaiapoi, where others in the party were dropped off. Instead of taking her home he had driven her to Pines Beach, and down a car track among scrub. Here, the complainant alleged, Gowland made advances to her, then pulled her out of the car by the hair and raped her. Eventually she got free and ran, barefooted, to nearby houses, with Gowland pursuing her part of the way. Dorothy Melva Crossan, a married woman living at Rinaldi avenue, Pines Beach, said that the complainant was “in a dreadful mess,” and looked very distraught, when she arrived to seek help. The complainant had said: “I have been raped.” She drove the

complainant home to Rangiora. The complainant, under a long cross-examination, admitted a practice of drinking in hotels with Gowland. She also admitted having told him, while at Pines Beach, that she would have intercourse with him if he took her home to Rangiora—but this, she said, was a ruse to get back within reach of help. She denied suggestions that she had been a willing party to intercourse. Mr Blunt: Did you not make all this up, and tell Mrs Crossan you had been raped, to explain your situation? Complainant: I didn’t make up that I had been raped, because I had been. Gowland, in his evidence, denied any struggle on the complainant’s part, and in cross-examination denied pursuing her. “She just walked off,” he said. He did not see which way she went, nor know that she went barefooted. Mr Blunt, in his address to the jury, said that Gowland had denied rape when first seen by the police, which denial he had maintained all along—but the Crown Prosecutor (Mr C. M. Roper) said that the whole circumstances of the case, especially the young woman’s flight in bare feet, leaving her calf-length boots and handbag behind, pointed to the truth of her story. His Honour, summing up, said that Mrs Crossan’s evidence was the sole corroboration of the complainant’s story. It was for the jury to decide whether the complainant’s condition, described by Mrs Crossan, was genuine, or whether she had been “putting on an act."